“A lawyer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign was acquitted Tuesday of lying to the FBI when he pushed information meant to cast suspicions on Donald Trump and Russia in the run-up to that year’s election. The case against Michael Sussmann was the first courtroom test of special counsel John Durham since his appointment three years ago to search for government misconduct during the investigation into potential ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign.” (AP News)

Michael Sussmann did exactly what he was accused of by Special Counsel John Durham. But the latter charged the former with lying to former FBI general counsel James Baker on the wrong day.

For three years, conservatives hyped John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s original investigation of Russia’s effort to help Donald Trump get elected president in 2016. Durham, a prosecutor appointed in 2019 by then-Attorney General William P. Barr, would blow the lid off the real scandal, they said, which was a conspiracy between Democrats and the FBI to get Trump. This would show there was never anything to the Russiagate scandal.

If special counsel John Durham didn’t get the verdict he wanted in the Michael Sussmann case, it’s because he did a better job of convicting the victim than he did the culprit—the victim being the FBI, the agency to which the Democratic lawyer allegedly lied when claiming he wasn’t acting for the Clinton campaign while peddling slime about Donald Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The first courtroom test for Special Counsel John Durham ended in defeat Tuesday as a federal jury found a Democratic attorney not guilty of making a false statement to the FBI about allegations of computer links between Donald Trump and Russia.

The jury deliberated for about six hours before acquitting Michael Sussmann, 57, on the single felony charge he faced: that he lied when he allegedly denied he was acting on behalf of any client in alerting the FBI to claims that a secret server linked Trump and a Moscow bank with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A jury in Washington on Tuesday found a former attorney for Hillary Clinton's U.S. presidential campaign not guilty of lying to the FBI when he met with the bureau in September 2016 to share a tip about possible communications between Donald Trump's business and a Russian bank.

A federal jury on Tuesday found former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann not guilty of lying to the FBI — finding special counsel John Durham did not prove his case beyond a reasonable doubt.

The verdict reached by jurors drawn from heavily Democratic-leaning DC came midway through the second day of deliberations following a two-week trial on a single count of making false statements to a federal agent.

Durham left the courthouse without commenting but issued a prepared statement a short time later.

Federal prosecutors on Friday presented closing arguments to a Washington jury in a criminal case against a former attorney for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, urging them to convict him for lying to the FBI in a bid to harm Donald Trump.

The case against the lawyer, Michael Sussmann, centers on whether he lied by claiming he was not representing any clients when in September 2016 he arranged a private meeting with the FBI's general counsel James Baker to pass along a now-debunked tip alleging the Trump Organization was secretly communicating with Russia's Alfa-Bank.

Prosecutors with special counsel John Durham’s team rested their case Wednesday against Hillary Clinton campaign attorney Michael Sussmann after presenting the jury with the strongest evidence yet that he lied to the FBI.

They showed the jury Mr. Sussmann’s billing records in which he charged Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign for the time he spent at the FBI peddling a false story about then-candidate Donald Trump’s links to Russia’s Alfa Bank, which has ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

FBI leaders pulled field agents from other investigations in 2016 to pursue a false tip linking presidential candidate Donald Trump to a Russian bank, but they concealed that the probe was spurred by information provided by rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign, an FBI agent testified in court Monday.

Top bureau officials sent an electronic communication marking the opening of the case and saying the investigation was based on a “referral” from the Justice Department rather than a tip from Michael Sussmann, an attorney for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.